Friday, August 2, 2013

Sheila Makhijani and Neha Choksi

Sheila Makhijani, Neha Choksi and Rina Banerjee are among the promising female artists artists from India. Sheila Makhijani creates abstract paintings on canvas, drawings in gouache on paper, stitched paper works and papercuts. The artist’s works quietly advance the tradition of abstract art in India, revealing new variations on how line, shape and color might layer and unfold.

Born in 1962 in New Delhi, she received her Bachelor and Masters of Fine Art from the College of Art, New Delhi. She traveled to Japan to study at Kanazawa Bijutsu Kogei Daigaku, in 1993. Her works have been showcased in exhibits at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Australia; National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi; Gemeentemuseum, Arnhem, and Kuntsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Neha Choksi is represented in APT7 by her lyrical video and related paintings that document a group of rural actors as they denude a Bodhi tree, leaving behind a single sprig. Themes of absence and erasure pervade her work, and here the near-stripped tree becomes a potent symbol of decay and renewal.

She received her MA in Classics from Columbia University, New York and her BAs in Greek and in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her work has been shown in Los Angeles, London, New York, Madrid, Amsterdam, Sydney, Istanbul, Delhi, Bombay, and as part of the 10th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Rina Banerjee’s sculptural assemblages at are fantastic combinations
of materials she sources in New York junk shops - textiles, clothing,
antique furnishings, taxidermy animals etc- that are configured into new
and exotic arrangements. Using a visual language steeped in fairytales
and mythology, and a similarly diverse range of objects, she presents a
series of recent wall-based sculptures.

Born in
Calcutta in 1963, she left India for England and then the United States
with her family when she was a young child. Trained as an engineer, she
obtained a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Yale in 1995 and
then settled in New York. All this while she maintained a close link
with her homeland largely thanks to numerous stays in Asia.